Objectivity and Subjectivity in Halacha and in General – Lesson 1

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[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, that’s not the truth. That’s the objective answer. And the subjective answer—the question is what the intensity of the light is that exists in my consciousness, not in the world. And there’s no direct relation between the two. It’s probably fairly clear that the stronger the field intensity is, the stronger a light I see. In that sense it’s monotonic. We know it’s monotonic. But we don’t know whether, when I double the field intensity, the conscious light also doubles. The question is whether the concept of “double” can even be defined there at all.

[Speaker B] And it could even be that the same person, with the same consciousness, in one situation will see a stronger light, and in another situation will say, “This is much stronger than what it was yesterday.” And it’s the same thing. That could also happen.

[Speaker D] There are also all the illusions.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That too is possible.

[Speaker D] You can think about it that way.

[Speaker B] Depending on his mood, his background, I don’t know. You can’t know.

[Speaker D] You can also think about it in terms of the intermediate-value idea of difficulty: if I have a state of darkness and a state of light, then there has to be some midpoint that I can sense. Okay. And then it does refer to something by which I can rank intensities.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m not sure about that. At most, maybe you can rank intensities, but you certainly still can’t determine that there’s a relation of “twice as much.” Maybe it’s multiplied by—I don’t know—or maybe it isn’t constant at all. When you say maybe there’s monotonicity, that’s what I said earlier: there is monotonicity here. It’s basically the intermediate value principle, that the function is monotonic. Okay, fine, there is monotonicity here, but nothing beyond that. You can’t know whether it’s linear, logarithmic, whether it jumps all over the place, whether it changes, whether it’s some crazy function. Monotonic, okay. Exponential is also monotonic.

[Speaker D] I can say the same thing to you if I tell you, “Lift a suitcase.” I tell you, lift a few suitcases, and now rank them from heaviest to lightest. So you’ll rank them, and then I’ll say: now, without a scale, tell me which one is twice as heavy as the other. I think you can feel that. Not sure.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It could be that you simply… because a person just doesn’t know how to measure intensities of an electromagnetic field. You need physical instruments, you need knowledge for that. It’s not something we do in everyday life. Weight, though—we measure in everyday life. So therefore we’re already automatically translating: when this weight is one kilo and that one is two kilos, we already know that means “twice as much.” We’re used to it. If we constantly did the same thing with light, and you walked around with a field-intensity meter and knew that this light was twice that one, then you too would already answer at the conscious level that this light is twice that one—not because that’s really so, but because you’d actually be answering the objective question, not the subjective one. Do you understand? You’re simply answering an objective question. As a guess? You think you’re answering a subjective question, but you’re not—you’re estimating what the measuring device would say. That’s really what you’re doing, you—

[Speaker D] You’re not answering what you experience. It’s like the association between a color and the word for that color. What? It’s like the association between a color and the word for that color, so you’re associating a physical intensity with an amount—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] —in the experience of color, and an electromagnetic field. The word is again another question. Right. You’re really answering the physical, objective question; you just know how to estimate it from your sensations, because you already have experience. You know the relation between the sensation and the physical result.

[Speaker J] Did Kant talk about the cognitive dimension here? What? When Kant said you can’t measure the thing-in-itself, was he talking only about this? We’ll get to him in a moment.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] We’ll get to him in a moment. So the claim is—there’s some debate there whether it’s a logarithmic law or a power law, because the question is whether if you double something it grows by 2 to some power, or whether it grows by log 2 plus, and so on. In other words, the field is so wide open that they don’t even know the form of the function—I’m not even talking about the index, the exponent of the power. But beyond that, how do they test it? They run experiments. They did experiments, they try to test it, to measure it in the lab. What do they do? They simply ask lots of people and average the results. That’s what they do. You can’t know. And it’s all nonsense. It’s worth nothing. It’s worth nothing because people are just telling you random things. You have no indication that what they answer really reflects anything. It reflects some sort of feeling, maybe, but not necessarily a feeling that exists in relation to the conscious phenomenon they’re seeing. Just some feeling. “Seems to me like twice as much.” Okay, fine. It’s not even… I mean, it’s not measuring the conscious phenomenon; it’s measuring a verbal reflex, I’d almost say. In other words, what are they used to saying when they experience something like this? That’s all. It really is something… and it’s a crazy tangle. Reading the book was also very nice, because I already knew the phenomenon beforehand: he tries to attack it from all directions and somehow still move toward the possibility of measuring things. They want to create a scientific field—psychophysics. So you need to define how things are measured, what the scales are, what the units are, what the yardstick is, and so on. You can’t do that. You simply ask people and average the nonsense they tell you. That’s all you’re doing. And that’s basically why it’s a field in psychology, not physics. It’s the question of what people answer when you ask them questions like these. That’s a psychological question. It has no connection to reality. Well, not no connection, but a very non-one-to-one connection to reality. As I said, monotonicity is probably preserved. If the light is stronger, nobody will say it’s weaker. That’s true. But that’s about it, not much beyond that.

[Speaker J] And where does that come from? What? And where does that come from? What? The definition that bigger is bigger than smaller. That that is preserved. Right. So that means there’s a slightly objective cognitive dimension here.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Correct. I’m saying there is a minimal objective dimension here, which I do think exists. In other words, the more intense the field is, the stronger a light a person will report. That, I think, is preserved for all human beings, it seems to me. Although in principle you could produce a person for whom even that isn’t preserved. I mean, there’s no—after all, if you have control over the brain, you can arrange it so that the sensors work in reverse. More light comes in, and he sees more darkness. What’s the problem? It’s not… more than that: in light of the previous problem I mentioned, the philosophers’ harmony, it could be that he really does also see more darkness—he just calls that “more light,” because he’s used to the fact that this thing is always called “more light,” that’s all. So he calls it “more light,” while in fact it’s darker in the language in which I would call it darkness, right? So in short, when we look at it this way, we are completely living in the Matrix. Living inside a Matrix. I mean, there’s no… the assumption that this isn’t a Matrix, but that there really is some reality that we all see in the same way and talk about and understand each other about and exchange experiences and opinions about—that’s an assumption with no basis other than that it seems that way to all of us. That’s how it seems to us. That’s what people generally assume. Okay. That’s what it’s worth, no more and no less. Intuition. Yes, a kind of intuition. And now decide how much trust you place in that thing. So there’s something here—this is why I’m bringing all this up—to emphasize that the concept of “subjective” is part of our world, strange as that sounds, like an oxymoron. It’s part of the world. The subjective, which supposedly is not the world, but only what… no, it’s an inherent part of our world. In other words, the world itself, at the essential level, is entirely subjective. Entirely subjective. Everything you say about the world… What? At the individual level.

[Speaker K] At the interpersonal level, you mean. No, the opposite.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Why? At the interpersonal level you try to translate it into some objective translation, but the world that you experience and see and perceive is entirely subjective—it’s all inside you. You have no way whatsoever to convey to me what you experience, in any way, for any kind of experience. Nothing. You tell me in words, I naturally translate that into the meaning of the words for me, and then we synchronize, we talk, and everything is fine. We can talk for a whole lifetime, understand each other, communicate, argue, convey ideas, be persuaded—everything—and we may in fact be talking about completely different things. Completely different. But everything is synchronized. Everything is fine because you’ll never feel that there’s some misunderstanding here, that we’re not talking about the same thing. No, everything is fully synchronized. And this is an insanely frustrating thing once you suddenly understand it. And this isn’t detached philosophical skepticism; it’s a physical fact. It’s a fact that we cannot know anything. We can make guesses with intuitions, but we cannot know anything beyond that. So this is not some bizarre skepticism where someone raises some far-off hypothesis. We have no indication that it’s not like this.

[Speaker J] And even empirically—for example, 1+2—I can define that what is “two” for me isn’t the “two” for you. Right, yes. Meaning, even mathematically—or say, for example, a magnetic field—I can conceive of it differently in itself; each person differently.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I think there’s a limit, yes, everything. You can’t know, from anything I say, what that thing represents for me. The difference between signifier and signified—the thing the postmodernists love so much.

[Speaker D] And why is that frustrating? It’s obvious that it’s the same for everyone. What? It’s obvious that it’s the same thing. I mean, no—you’re saying we have no way to prove it, but it’s like every most basic inference we make in life.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I assume that too, and it’s very frustrating that this assumption, which is so basic, has no indication whatsoever that could help me know whether it’s true or not.

[Speaker D] Fine, but that’s like every question of skepticism.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, I’m used to places where there are one or another such points, and there I assume something, and you can challenge it with a skeptical objection—but I assume that’s how it is. But when my whole world is like that, that’s disturbing, no? When my whole world is like that, not just the principle of causality. That’s something, okay, something significant, but okay, one specific point where I know—I have some intuition, I have no way to prove it or measure it, but—

[Speaker C] —I have that kind of intuition.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] If it’s at this point or another point, I can place them well within some relatively stable world. If my whole world is like that, then it’s problematic. I mean, I don’t know—psychologically problematic, that’s all. True, I also assume that we see more or less the same thing. I assume that, although I don’t know if it’s true for everything, but broadly speaking I tend to think there really is synchronization. But it’s fairly frustrating to think that your whole life is some kind of Matrix, that you assume it’s like that—and who knows, really everything could be a Matrix.

[Speaker L] What was the starting point? Who started it?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean, who started it?

[Speaker L] I mean, some starting point where one person decided that this shape looks to him a certain way. Why suddenly?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll explain it exactly the way objectivists explain it. It doesn’t matter. And what are objectivists anyway? That’s nonsense—anyone who says otherwise just doesn’t understand anything. It’s not a dispute. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn’t understand. Just today some guy sent me—some pathological academic—sent me an email. He wrote a book, doesn’t matter, actually it doesn’t matter. He sent me an email claiming that I had retracted what I said in other books, and he was very excited and happy about the idea that I had changed my mind. I didn’t retract anything—what do you want? So he explains that I really have this sort of characteristic, and following Shadal he has all sorts of academic classifications like this, the relation between reason and revelation—I don’t know—everything you’re saying is completely undefined. So explain to me what reason is, what revelation is, and what contradiction is. I told him there are ten ways to explain this and this and this. And after that, start classifying. First explain to me what you’re talking about. Why did I bring that up? Wait, I lost it.

[Speaker C] Here, the question was what it started from—so basically the Rabbi is claiming there is no starting point?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, basically it’s like language—I no longer remember how I got to this. Just as language comes into being from—what? But how does language begin? Someone invents a word and says, this is what’s called a triangle. Now he talks with someone else. Slowly, the community still wants some means to communicate among themselves, and they create a language or a conceptual system, a system of linguistic rules, so that communication becomes possible.

[Speaker M] And I translate it more into my own language. What? When I come to explain to someone what a triangle is, I’ll need to… You’re saying the child—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, no, no, you’re not translating anything for him. That’s exactly the point. You don’t need to translate anything for him. You say to him, this is what’s called a book. Now maybe over there he’s actually seeing a gramophone, but he’s used to the fact that this thing is called a book, and therefore you’ll always talk about a book and understand each other. Everything is fine; you don’t need to translate anything for him. On the contrary, you explain to him exactly what you want to explain. You don’t need to know at all that he sees different things. You’re synchronized only because of the language. Language synchronizes you, nothing else. What lies behind the language is completely different. There’s no—there doesn’t have to be any connection. I don’t think that’s actually true; I’m only saying it in principle. Understand? You don’t need to synchronize anything—that’s the whole point. Which is why anyone who explains—now I remember why I recalled this thing. I said that anyone who says otherwise simply doesn’t understand; it’s not a dispute. So he starts discussing with me the question whether he holds the concept of double truth. What is “double truth”? Something can be… I was talking there about Jewish law and morality. He was happy to see that I too had adopted the concept of double truth. What double truth are you talking about? There is no contradiction between Jewish law and morality. They’re simply talking about different things. That’s all. That’s not a contradiction. A contradiction is when you talk about the same thing and say the opposite. I said it’s like the chocolate example I brought there: I won’t eat it because it’s fattening, but I want to eat it because it’s tasty. Is there a contradiction here? What double truth? In terms of taste it’s tasty, in terms of fat it’s fattening. That’s all. I have a conflict over what to do—eat it or not eat it, okay. But a conflict is not a contradiction. Now people don’t define the concepts, and they build—write whole books on whether reason contradicts revelation or does not contradict revelation. This is so-and-so’s approach, that reason contradicts, and this is… you haven’t defined what reason is, what revelation is, and what contradiction is. And regarding each of these things I told him, I showed him five possibilities I could explain, and according to almost all of them, everything he says is meaningless. In the end he got tired of me and said, okay, I understand. He wrote books about this.

[Speaker B] Instead of saying, okay, I didn’t understand.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, he understood. I think he did understand, but with academics this is very common. They write books and classify opinions and approaches and everything. But they don’t define the concepts—what the opinions are, what… In Jewish thought this is very common. Almost everything written there is simply a collection of meaningless word salad.

[Speaker C] That’s how people become professors.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] That’s exactly how people become professors, really exactly that—at least many of them. Really, many of them become professors from this. The question whether revelation contradicts reason or not. Nobody defines anything: what revelation is, what reason is, and what contradiction is. Once you define those things, you see there aren’t different approaches. There’s only one approach. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn’t understand, or is conceptually confused, or uses the concepts differently, that’s all. But now you understand that from that you won’t become a professor. If everyone says the same thing, what are you going to write an article about? You have to say there are two approaches, and this one says this and that one says that, and there are practical implications, and he studied with him and was influenced by him—and usually it’s all just a pile of complete nonsense. It says nothing. It’s unbelievable how much nonsense is written there—things that hold up nothing, say nothing. Anyway, that’s how I remembered it. In short, here too, “objectivists”—as I said before, by objectivists I mean confused people. There is no such thing as objectivists. Someone who thinks that we… You can say people with different intuitions. There are those whose intuition is skeptical, and they say that really we see different colors and it’s not true that it’s the same color. And others intuitively think it is the same color. Here there can be an argument, there can be a dispute. Why? Because there is no way whatsoever to determine who is right and who is wrong. What you assume is what you assume. Okay? But there’s no room here for some objectivist position. There are those who think there’s a gap between our cognition and the world, and there are those who say, what are you talking about, what we see is the world. Anyone who says the second claim is simply confused. Because what we see is not the world. It is a translation of the world. The question whether it’s the same translation or not—that can be discussed. But about this, you can always read vast philosophical literature on the debate over whether what we see is the world or whether what we see is the representation of the world. It’s simply a collection of nonsense by confused people. Clearly what we see is only a representation. In the world itself there are no colors. In the world itself there are no sounds. That is a physical fact. It is not a philosophical position. The question is what there is in the world that causes this—fine, that’s where discussion can begin. And whether it’s the same for all of us, and everything we discussed before. Okay, enough. In any case, this sense of subjectivity is actually the most objective thing there is. It is the most basic reality there is—it is this subjective thing. Everything beyond that is wrapping: the words, the ways we describe the thing, the translations it goes through in us. But the world as we perceive it is actually something subjective. And therefore it has an almost opposite meaning from the first meaning I gave of the term “subjective,” where I said: yes, there’s no truth or falsehood here, no real truth here, it’s some sort of feeling—I like it, you don’t like it, okay, that doesn’t say anything about the world. We once talked about Borges’s story, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” from Borges’s fictions. Maybe in that same series on the Torah too. And there he gives—he really was a brilliant writer—he gives a very beautiful description of the idealist or solipsist view. The view that says there is no world, there are only our perceptions of the world, but outside there is nothing at all. More radically, one should say: we have no indication that there is something outside. How do you know there isn’t? But he says: I have no indication to assume there is. All I know is that I experience things, that I perceive things. And then he says that in a world ruled by solipsistic thought—that is, the thought that there really is no reality—then in practice you can connect a collection of things that have no connection at all and create a concept out of them. The bird’s cry in the distance together with the color of the cloud in the north and sitting on a floor with black spots—that is what is called plutocracy. Why? Because when I define a set of characteristics—for example, I say: what is a shtender? A shtender is something that has two metal legs, with a wooden board resting on them, slanted, with some kind of stopper, I don’t know, rectangular, and so on. That is a collection of characteristics that come together and create this object called a shtender. But in a world in which there are no objects, only characteristics, then why are you connecting specifically this set of characteristics?

[Speaker B] Any combination of characteristics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. Why are you connecting specifically this set of characteristics? What do they have in common? Why does specifically this set create an object for you? After all, from the perspective of someone who says there is an object that bears the characteristics, then they understand: all these are characteristics of this object. So that’s why I connect them all together and say, okay, this is what’s called a shtender. But if you say there are no shtenders in the world, all there is is a set of characteristics, then why this particular set of characteristics, this cluster, creates a concept? You could connect all kinds of different and strange characteristics, some set of characteristics. If there are a hundred thousand characteristics in the world, then two to the hundred-thousandth is the number of subsets there are. And therefore that is the number of objects there are. Every subset of the set of characteristics is an object. Okay? And this is a beautiful description of the concept that if you think your characteristics don’t express something that exists in the world itself, but are floating characteristics—what there is are only characteristics, not characteristics of something—then there is no logic in preferring one combination of characteristics over another, except perhaps convenience of use. Meaning, if there’s some set of three characteristics that very often you need to talk about together, you say, okay, let’s call those three together “Moshe.” And from now on I’ll talk about Moshe, because instead of mentioning the three characteristics every time, I’ll call it that for convenience. But not because it really represents what we normally call an object in our ordinary outlook. This too is just another expression of that possibility that in fact there is nothing outside at all. And if there is nothing outside at all, then our language is entirely some fiction of convenience and nothing more. And this itself shows that our basic intuition is not like that, because in practice we treat objects with respect; that is, for us there is such a thing as a shtender. It’s not some arbitrary construct. So that means we assume that there is an object in the world that bears these characteristics, this set of characteristics, and therefore that set represents an object. It’s not just some random combination, I picked a few characteristics. There is a critique by Zeitlin of Kant. In his book On the Border of Two Worlds, Zeitlin brings—it’s not his, he brings some Russian philosopher whose name I forgot—who criticized Kant. He says Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumenon is itself entirely within the phenomenon. How do you know that there is the thing in itself, the thing as it appears to our eyes? I haven’t said this yet, but I’m about to get to it. But that distinction itself, between the world itself and my perception of the world, exists entirely within my perception. After all, I have no access whatsoever to the world as such. So in fact that distinction too is part of how I perceive the world and doesn’t touch the world itself. So the question is how you can speak of there being something in the world itself—

[Speaker E] The Rabbi’s quote about that person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes. So here I really come to Kant, because I think Kant was the one who first put his finger on this in the sharpest way. Today, I think, since we already know a bit about how the brain works and how our consciousness works, this ought to be almost a scientific fact, not a philosophical position. It’s obvious. You can’t say otherwise at all. So he says there is a difference between how I perceive the world and—or these are two different planes. The phenomenal plane, the plane of appearances, how the world appears to me, and the world itself. The thing that appears—not the appearance, but the appearing thing. That is the world itself. So Kant made the distinction between these two planes. We won’t get into right now why he did it and what he wanted to gain from it, but he made this distinction. And very often people interpret Kant as though Kant was talking about some limitation of human perception. We have no way to perceive the world as it really is. We are imprisoned within our perceptual tools or our cognitive tools. I once had an argument with Yoel Bin-Nun in Akdamot 10; he wrote an article in Akdamot 10 and I responded in Akdamot 11. There he presented Kant exactly in that way, and I told him I think he was mistaken. The point is that I don’t think that’s right. Kant is not talking about a limitation in our perception of the world. When Kant says that the color yellow is a conscious phenomenon, and what there is in the world itself is an electromagnetic wave of a certain wavelength—what causes the color yellow—that does not point to any limitation. When I perceive the world itself, I am not perceiving anything else. I am perceiving the world itself. What there is in the world itself is some electromagnetic wave, some concept called an electromagnetic wave. But when I perceive it, I have to put it into some conceptual system—the conceptual system I use. For example, color. Color belongs to the conceptual system I use. So to say that I have a limitation, that I fail to perceive the world, is really to say: maybe in the world the color is actually red, and you see it as yellow because you’re trapped, you’re looking at it through yellow cellophane. You’re looking at it through yellow cellophane, so you’re actually missing something in the world itself. You’re limited by your perceptual tools. But that is not what Kant says, I think. What Kant says is that in the world itself there is no color at all—not that maybe the color is not yellow but red. The whole concept of color is a cognitive concept; it is not a concept in the world. In the world there is an electromagnetic wave; only in our consciousness are there colors. Therefore this is not a limitation. The way to perceive an electromagnetic wave is to see a color. Those are the tools with which I perceive. When I say, I grasp this shtender with my hand—that’s how I grasp it, with my hand. I mean physically grasp, not intellectually grasp. I grasp it with my hand. Is that a limitation? You can’t grasp a shtender without a hand. To grasp means to hold in your hand—that’s what grasping means. Right? When I say to grasp an electromagnetic wave means to see it. What does it mean to see it? It means to take it and translate it into a visual image within consciousness. It’s not a limitation that says maybe it really looks completely different and you see it this way. No, it doesn’t look completely different. In the world itself it doesn’t look at all. To look means to produce an image through the eyes—that’s what looking means. Therefore there is no way in which it really looks and the way I see it. The way it really looks is the way I see it. There is no such thing as “really looks.” To look means to be seen by someone. Right? There is no king without a people, as the Sages say. Meaning, a king needs subjects. If he has no subjects, he isn’t a king. Like in Adon Olam we say, “Master of the universe, who reigned before any creature was created.” Meaning, He was king before any creature was created. So that somewhat contradicts “there is no king without a people.” But apparently this is a king and this is the King of kings, so they make some sort of distinction there. But my point here is: seeing means perceiving something through the eyes and producing a video image in my head, a visual image in my head. That is called seeing. It’s not that there is some limitation—there’s a true appearance, and that’s the appearance I perceive, and the question is whether it’s the same thing. No. There is no true appearance. The appearance I perceive is the appearance of the thing. You ask me what the thing itself is? The thing itself is an electromagnetic wave. Everything you say about an electromagnetic wave will always be in your language. Whatever you say. It will always be in your language. The only thing I can say beyond that is that there is something there called an electromagnetic wave. That’s it. Anything I say about that something will always be from within my language. And therefore this is not a limitation; it is what is called perception. Perception means taking that amorphous, undefined thing called an electromagnetic wave and inserting it into my perceptual tools. That is what it means to perceive it. That’s the definition of the concept of perception. It’s not a limitation. That’s simply what perceiving means. Okay? So this is not about limitations. Now I want to take one more step. I said earlier that the concept “subjective,” the first meaning of the term “subjective,” is something that is a matter of taste. I like it, you don’t like it. There’s no claim here about the world, no truth or falsehood; rather, there is something where I report what I feel, and that doesn’t really claim anything about the world. But even in that context, it’s not at all certain that there really is such a thing. Maybe there is, I don’t know. But very many of the things we think are of that kind actually belong to the second type, not the first. And here the most beautiful description of this phenomenon that I know appears in a book by Lewis—I think I may have mentioned it once before, I no longer remember. Lewis is the one from Narnia, C. S. Lewis, children’s stories. But he was also a devout Christian and a very interesting philosopher, and he knew how to write philosophy too, not only literature. And he wrote a book called The Abolition of Man, published in Hebrew by Shalem. He was of course a conservative thinker; otherwise they wouldn’t publish him there. And he begins like this—I’ll read you selected passages because he writes it beautifully. “It would be dangerous if we did not give due consideration to the importance of elementary textbooks for young children.” How true that is. Today I sent regards to my first-grade teacher. The mother of Yoav Sorek, the journalist—I’m connected with him somehow—I told her, please send regards to your mother; she was my first-grade teacher. So there are also very powerful influences of teachers from infancy, or books from infancy. “Therefore I have chosen as the starting point for these lectures”—this series of lectures—“this little book for teaching literature intended for boys and girls in eleventh and twelfth grades. I do not suppose that the authors of the said book, two authors, intended harm. I must thank them or their publisher for sending me a complimentary copy. Yet I have not a single good word to say in their praise. And here you have a rather awkward situation. I have no wish to denounce two active and modest teachers who did their best as they understood it, yet I cannot remain silent regarding the true tendency of their work as I understand it. I shall therefore use pseudonyms, Gaius and Titius, and I shall call their book The Green Book. And I promise you, I have such a book on my shelves. I’m just not going to tell you what book it is and who the authors are.” And then he says this: “In the second chapter of their book they bring the well-known story of Coleridge by the waterfall. Surely you will remember—those who remember—that two tourists were present there, one of whom called the waterfall sublime, while the other called it pretty. And Coleridge inwardly accepted the first opinion and rejected the second with disgust.” He says the first one was right—it was sublime, not pretty. “And this is the interpretation of Gaius and Titius,” the anonymous authors of Lewis’s book. “When the man said ‘This is sublime,’ he appeared to be saying something about the waterfall. In reality, however, he was not talking about the waterfall at all, but about his own feelings. He was merely saying, ‘I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime,’ or, briefly, ‘I have sublime feelings.’” So there you have it—quite a number of deep questions are solved here with admirable brevity. He’s mocking them, of course, the authors. “But the authors have not yet finished. They now add the following sentence: ‘This confusion is present all the time in language as we use it. We seem to be saying something very important about something else, but in reality we are only saying something about our own feelings.’” Which is exactly what I described earlier, right? So he says: the man and woman don’t really have an argument at all. He said, “It’s sublime,” and she said, “It’s pretty.” He reports what feelings were aroused in him, and she reports what feelings were aroused in her. There’s no real argument. I’m not disputing with you that those feelings were aroused in you, and I’m not disputing with her that those feelings were aroused in her. Fine—it’s not an argument. But if these two people are quarreling over whether it is sublime or pretty, then they are simply confused—so say these authors. Coleridge presents it as a real argument, but of course they say, what nonsense, that’s just literary phrasing. The truth is that there is no argument here at all; each one is describing the feelings aroused in him or her. And then Lewis says: of course that’s not true. “Before examining the questions raised by this little but important passage”—remember, it is intended for eleventh and twelfth grade students—understand that when this is learned from a textbook for eleventh and twelfth grades, it’s a schoolbook, and the child understands that he has now been taught the facts of life. Know that when you say sublime or pretty, you are really talking about yourself, not about the world. We learned this in class, we’re tested on it, afterward you have to know it for the exam, this thing. Now this is total nonsense, simply not true. But it’s course material; you are tested on it as though it were knowledge we have already gathered. This is not the teacher’s personal opinion—the teacher can express his opinion that this is what he thinks. No—this is the material, you are tested on it and have to know it for the exam. Okay? That’s why this really is the kind of thing people often don’t notice. So he says: “It cannot be that the man who says ‘This is sublime’ means ‘I have sublime feelings.’ From any remotely plausible point of view, that cannot be what he means. Even if we accept the assumption that qualities like sublimity are not qualities of the things themselves but projections of our feelings onto them, still the feelings that bring about the projection are the very opposite of the projected qualities. The feelings that lead a man to call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of awe.” I feel awe, and therefore I say that the thing is sublime. That is a conclusion. What exists in me leads me to say something about the thing. So when I say that the thing is sublime, I am not saying—after all, let’s put it this way. When I stand before this waterfall, I say, “This waterfall is sublime.” When I stand before another waterfall, I say, “No, it’s a nice waterfall,” or “not nice,” whatever—“it’s not sublime, it doesn’t arouse in me feelings of sublimity.” If all waterfalls aroused in me feelings of sublimity, there would be no need to say it; I wouldn’t need to get all the way to this waterfall and say “this is sublime.” Clearly there are waterfalls that are not like this. Okay? Now why? Why does this one arouse in me a feeling of sublimity and that one not? That one is only pretty. And why does it arouse in her a feeling of prettiness rather than sublimity? Clearly there is something in the waterfall because of which I have a feeling of sublimity. Right? Otherwise, what have I said? But if so, then when I say this waterfall is sublime, I am saying something about the waterfall. Right? True, I describe it in the language of what feelings it arouses in me—I say it arouses in me feelings of sublimity. But that is my way of speaking about the waterfall. It’s like when I say, I see the color yellow. I see that this is yellow and this is green. Exactly. So that means the electromagnetic field here is not the same field as the one here—a different wavelength. So I said it in a language drawn from my subjective world, but that is only the language I use, because I’m trapped within that language; I have no other language. But obviously I mean to say something about the world. To say that I’m only saying things about myself is basically to smuggle in some subjective worldview here, saying there is really nothing in the world at all, just some sort of solipsism. Okay? Which is fine—you’re entitled to hold such a view—but you can’t teach children and then test them on it as though it were a fact. You see? As though they’re explaining the mistake to the children: there was some projection here. Maybe that’s what you think, teacher, but then say, “This is my position.” You can’t teach it as course material and then examine them on whether they know the material. And if they say otherwise, deduct points because they were wrong. Titius too had points deducted because they were Gaius. Meaning, it’s the same thing—you present worldviews as facts. And that confusion is the confusion I talked about earlier.

[Speaker O] That’s Bin-Nun—Bin-Nun, meaning the two teachers—that’s maybe a view that… right.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly related, related to that very debate, and that’s why I’m bringing it. The point is that when I say something is yellow, I’ve said something about the thing, even though I formulated it in a language drawn from my subjective conceptual world—or perhaps the intersubjective world. Let’s say that all of us really do see the same color. Even then, it’s clear that the concept of color is a subjective concept, because the world itself has no color. Color exists only in my consciousness. Even if it exists for all of us in the same way, it still exists for all of us on the subjective plane, because in the world itself, it is a fact that there is no color. About that there is no dispute; that is certainly true. Color exists only in consciousness. The question is whether that is subjective or intersubjective—the intention being that all subjects have it in the same way. But you can’t say it’s objective. Objective it is not. It is not something about the world itself.

[Speaker P] Doesn’t the sensation of pain make it a touchstone for something objective? Absolutely not.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The sensation of pain is the most subjective thing there is.

[Speaker P] No, it’s—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] says that if they give you anesthesia, you won’t feel pain. So what’s the problem? The same thing happened to you—the same wound, the same blow—you can receive it and not feel any pain, because they anesthetized you. So what does that mean? That the sensation of pain is something subjective on your part. True, usually it reflects a wound, and therefore when I say, “It hurts,” that too is the same thing, the same mistake—we have to be careful. I don’t mean to speak only about what is happening to me; rather, through that I mean to describe to you that something objective happened to me that caused me a sensation of pain. I’m trying to show you how strong the blow was that I received, or how deep the wound is, or I don’t know, something like that. I formulate it in subjective language, in language drawn from my subjective world, but my intention is to make a claim about the world. And therefore I say that the first meaning of the concept “subjective,” which is supposedly the simple meaning—that it means not something that claims something about the world, but rather just some personal feeling of mine—after that I brought the second meaning of the concept “subjective,” which is something not accessible to objective measuring tools, but it still may be making some kind of claim, some claim about which there is truth or falsehood. And now I’m saying: I’m not at all sure that the simple, more primary meaning even exists. It could be that it’s always the second meaning. Even when we talk about ourselves, usually—or I don’t know if always, but many times—what we really mean is to say something about the world, and we use our subjective language. I’ll say again: it’s not always like that. For example, when I’m depressed and I try to tell someone, “Listen, I’m depressed.” I’m not really coming to tell him about the world—what a lousy world this is, look, it makes me depressed. That would be in the sense Lewis is talking about, where I’m using the term “depression,” which is a subjective concept, in order to make a claim about the world. But say when I go to a psychologist to help me, I’m not coming to make claims to him about the world, I’m coming to tell him truly what’s going on with me. That really is what I want to tell him. There it really is true that I’m speaking only about the subjective dimension. I’m not trying to use subjective language in order to make claims about the world. I’m coming to say to him, “Listen, help me, I’m depressed,” with no connection to what’s happening in the world. On the contrary, it could be that the world is cheerful and happy, but for me that causes depression, because a happy world causes me depression. Okay? Other people are very happy about it. That doesn’t mean that we see the world differently; it means that the impact of the world on us is different. When I go to a psychologist, truly the whole point is only my subjective feeling, not that I’m using subjective terminology to describe something about the world. Therefore I say that there the basic meaning of the concept “subjective” still remains. But in very many places—and not to mention ethical arguments, moral arguments—there too there are those who will tell you the same thing that those Titius and Gaius people say. That basically I’m only telling you what I feel about things; it’s not really a claim. Moral relativism often rests on the idea that morality is, all in all, just a feeling. When I feel bad seeing someone murder, I call it bad to murder. Someone else has no problem with murder, so he doesn’t feel bad, so from his perspective murder isn’t bad. So is this a claim about the world, that murder is bad? No, it’s a claim about what I feel. And again the same discussion: the question is whether there is any argument here at all, or whether each person is just telling you what feelings are aroused in him. So moral objectivists say, “What are you talking about?” These feelings reflect some objective claim—not a physical claim, of course, but some objective claim: murder is bad. It obligates everyone, and even if you don’t feel it, if you murder, what you’re doing is bad. No—not only because I feel differently. The feeling is only an indication that murder is bad; it is not the definition of the claim that murder is bad. Rather, it is an indication, a sign, that murder really is bad. Why does my conscience say it’s bad? Apparently it really is bad. But it’s not true that all I’m saying is only a claim about my inner feelings. The same thing we spoke about here regarding aesthetics, about the sublime and the beautiful in the aesthetic realm—the same thing also exists in the ethical realm. Because all these things are not physical pictures, and so there people have some tendency to think this is discourse that is entirely subjective. Solipsistic philosophers say the same thing even about physical facts; there too they say the same thing—it’s really just statements about us. And there most people don’t really take that option seriously. But in the aesthetic and ethical context, many people understand it that way, but many of them don’t really think that’s the case. They’re confused, because they really don’t distinguish between talking about subjectivity in the first meaning and talking about subjectivity in the second meaning, which is not accessible to objective measurement. But that doesn’t mean I’m only talking about things of mine. It means that I’m using my language to describe things in the world, or in the moral world or in the aesthetic world, it doesn’t matter. Okay? People who don’t understand the difference between the two meanings of the concept “subjective” sometimes adopt a mistaken philosophical view that they themselves don’t really believe. They just say, “Wait, but it’s not accessible to something objective, so therefore it doesn’t exist.” But no: true, it’s not accessible to something objective, but it does exist—it’s just not accessible to something objective. So there is a concept of subjectivity regarding which there really is truth or falsehood; it’s just not accessible to objective tools. It’s hard for me to convey it to someone else. That doesn’t mean there is no truth and falsehood here. And therefore sometimes the lack of distinction, which is supposedly only semantic—it’s just a dictionary matter, I defined two concepts of the term, two meanings of the term “subjective,” a dictionary definition—but someone who doesn’t understand that there are two such meanings can draw an incorrect philosophical conclusion. It’s not only a semantic issue; semantics often projects onto how we think. Okay? And therefore these distinctions are important not only in order to understand the concepts, but very often they have implications for our philosophical conclusions. Okay.